Chris: Geek Guy

Google offer a standalone installer for the Windows build of Google Chrome, as opposed to the standard download which is actually just a small stub application that connects to Google’s servers to download and install the actual browser.

The offline installer is handy if you have a number of machines on which to install or update Chrome, but unfortunately Google haven’t updated it recently, so you end up with version 3.0.195.38 rather than the latest all-singing, all-dancing, extension-supporting version 4.0.249.89.

You can of course update to 4.0.249.89 from the About screen, but this defeats the purpose of using the standalone installer in the first place, and you may be unlucky enough to be on a corporate network which breaks the in-browser upgrade functionality.

By using Fiddler2 to monitor the activity of the stub installer, I was able to establish that it connects to the following google.com URL to download the latest build:

http://cache.pack.google.com/edgedl/chrome/install/249.89/chrome_installer.exe

This is your standalone/offline installer, which can be used to install new instances of Chrome or upgrade existing ones (in which case the installer will upgrade your browser silently).

Google release new builds fairly frequently, so keep an eye on the Google Chrome Releases blog and substitute 249.89 with the build number of the latest stable (or development, if you’re feeling brave) build, e.g. http://cache.pack.google.com/edgedl/chrome/install/322.2/chrome_installer.exe for version 5.0.322.2.

The beta version of Google Chrome has supported extensions for many months, but Google today released a stable Windows version of Chrome 4.0 which supports extensions together with a handful of other features and improvements. Both The Official Google Blog and the Google Chrome blog have full details.

To get the update, click the About Google Chrome menu option (viathe spanner icon) and click Check for Updates.

I’ll keep this post short and sweet as I’m now off to the extensions gallery to pick up some new enhancements for my favourite browser!

I noticed today that the Google logo shown at the top of all search results is actually a composite image, sliced up through clever use of CSS positioning:

At first, I thought of this as nothing more than a neat trick, but then I began to think about why Google might have decided to use this technique to their advantage.

Whenever a client browser requests a page, it will also make a request for each of the images (and other media) embedded into the page. Once an image has been displayed once, it is usually cached client-side to conserve bandwidth and improve performance for subsequent loads. For example, the RSS logo at the top of my blog will be downloaded from my server on your first visit, but as you move through the site, future references to the file will be fulfilled from your browser’s cache.

Google isn’t particularly image-heavy, but a typical results page could contain five or more ’sprites’ or graphical elements. By squeezing them into a single file, user’s Web browsers need only make two requests (one for the page itself and one for the composite image) instead of six or more.

This might sound trivial, but considering that Google serve billions of result pages to millions of different visitors every day, the cumulative saving in bandwidth and server resources is likely to add up to quite a figure.

If you operate a moderately high-traffic site, it might be worth considering using similar tactics. The only other site that I’ve noticed that has used CSS image slicing in this way is the now-defunct Cdiscount UK site, for its pricing images.

I just tried to install Google Chrome on my Windows 7 machine and was faced with this obscure error message.

I found the answer on the Chrome support site – it’s caused by the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Setup\State\ImageState

Mine was set to IMAGE_STATE_UNDEPLOYABLE. Removing this value enabled the Google Chrome installer to proceed as normal.

The upcoming Google Chrome OS is basically a stripped-down operating system that runs nothing but a Web browser. The video above explains the rationale behind this, and what makes Chrome OS so great.

Chrome OS won’t be ready for prime time until some time next year, but if you want to give it a go, there’s a pre-release version here which you can download and run in a virtual machine.

Google Reader allows you to star articles to read later, which is handy. However, I’ve been happily starring away items since I’ve started using Reader, and have built up quite a backlog. On the advice of a friend who was horrified by this, I decided to unstar all items before a certain date. Surprisingly, Google Reader doesn’t currently give you a way to do this, besides unstarring each item individually, which isn’t much fun when you have over 500, even using the ’s’ (star/unstar) and ‘j’ (jump to next item) keyboard shortcuts.

To automate this process, I whipped up this quick and dirty AutoHotkey script:

^!r::
Loop 600 {
Send s
Sleep 10
Send j
Sleep 10
}

As you may have worked out, this simply simulates a press of the ’s’ key, waits ten milliseconds, simulates the ‘j’ key, waits again, then repeats the process 600 times.

The first line of the file means “do the below when the user presses Ctrl+Alt+R”.

So all I had to do was save the script, double-click the .AHK file to activate it, then click on “Starred items” with Reader, click to open the first one and press Ctrl+Alt+R to instruct the script to start rifling through your items, unstarring them one by one. Because I had slightly less than 600 starred items, I found that the script “sticks” on the last item, starring and unstarring it repeatedly until I killed the script by right-clicking the “H” icon in the taskbar and clicking Exit.

Feel free to use my script to clear down your own starred items. If you find that the script seems to miss the odd item, you may need to increase the 10 ms delay.

If you’re itching to try Google Wave but haven’t yet picked up an invite, leave a comment on this post and I’ll send you an invite if you’re one of the the first 25 to respond.

As you probably know, Google has a very good calculator feature built-in. However, if you use Firefox, you don’t even need to access the Google website to use it – just type your sum in the search box (with the Google search engine selected) and, as if by magic, the answer will appear below, in the box normally reserved for suggested search phrases.

GooSync is a service which allows you to synchronise your Google Calendar with your mobile phone or PDA. Unlike Google Calendar, which is only accessible via your mobile device’s web browser, GooSync ties in with the calendar/reminder function provided as part of your PDA or phone. This could potentially save you a lot of money if, like me, you’re on a fairly meagre data plan and like to check your schedule regularly.

GooSync is provided by Wolverhampton-based Toffa International, who specialise in sync software. The basic service is free to use, while power users may benefit from the £19.95/year subscription account which offers additional features such as multiple calendar support.

I signed up for the free service with the intention of writing a review, but to be honest there’s not much to be said. I signed up for the account, clicked the confirmation link sent to my email address, authorised GooSync to access my calendar via Google’s API and requested an auto-configuration message to be sent to my handset (Sony Ericsson W880i) via SMS. Opening the configuration SMS prompted me to install the new sync settings, then it was just a matter of telling the phone to synchronise.

The latest service to come out of Google’s labs is Google Page Creator, a basic web editor that runs through your browser. I’ve had a play with it here and I like what I see; it’s very simple at the moment but it’s very difficult to create a bad-looking web page, which is more than can be said for similar services.